This thesis makes the legal argument that certain histories of aboriginal child removals in Canada and Australia, that is, the residential school experience in Canada, and the program of child institutionalization in Australia, meet the definition of 'genocide' in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. My primary focus is on that Convention's requirement that an act be committed with an "intent to destroy a group". My first concern in formulating legal argument around the Convention's intent requirement is to offer a theory of the legal subject implicit in legal liberalism. Legal liberalism privileges the individual, and individual responsibility, in order to underscore its founding premises of freedom and equality. The intentionality of the subject in this framework is a function of the individual, and not the wider cultural and historical conditions in which the subject exists. Using a historical socio-legal approach, I attempt to develop a framework of legal subjectivity and legal intent which reveals rather than suppresses the cultural forces at work in the production of an intent to genocide. Having reacquainted the subject with the universe beyond the individual, I move on with the first limb of my legal argument around intent in the Genocide Convention to address the systemic means through which child removal policy was developed and enforced. In this, I confront two difficulties: firstly, the difficulty of locating in any single person an intent to commit, and hence responsibility for, genocide; and secondly, the corresponding difficulty of finding that a system intended an action in the legal sense. I respond to both of these difficulties by arguing for a notion of legal subjectivity which comprehends organisations, and correspondingly a notion of intent which is responsive (both on an individual and an organisational level) to systematically instituted crimes such as genocide. The second limb of my argument around intent confronts the defence of benevolent intent. In this defence, enforcers of child removals rely on a genuine belief in the benevolence of the 'civilising' project they were engaged in, so that there can be no intent to destroy a group. I reveal the cultural processes at work to produce the profound disjunction between aboriginal and settler subjectivities, especially as those subjectivities crystallize around the removal of aboriginal children. I locate this disjunction in the twin imperatives of colonial culture, those of oppression and legitimation. I argue that colonial culture exacts a justification for oppression, and that aboriginal people have been "othered" (in gendered, raced, and classed terms) to provide it. Intent to destroy a group, then, will be located via an enquiry which confronts the interests of colonial culture and aligns them firstly with the oppression of aboriginal people, and secondly with the discourses which developed to render that oppression in benevolent terms. The interpretation of the Genocide Convention is thus guided by the demands of context: and in context is revealed an intent to genocide by child removal. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

Practically since its celebrated premiere in 1967, George Ryga's drama about urban Native Canadians, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, has enjoyed canonical status in Canada. Yet the same three decades that have seen over 200 productions of Rita Joe have also witnessed radical transformations in the ways First Nations' peoples are represented, heard and perceived in Canada. How has a play written about Natives by a non-Native man in 1967 managed such a long production history on such contentious and unstable ground? How do identity politics influence this piece of theatre, and how does the theatre shape identity politics? As popular notions about Native identities have changed and as Native people continue to represent themselves in and put of court, and on and off the stage, this play about Native people in Canada has been performed and re-performed. But the directors, the venues, the actors, the costumes and sets, the language itself and (most significantly) the resulting characterizations have changed over the years — in subtle and rather dramatic ways. While the words and the fundamental plot of Rita Joe have remained the same, its messages about Native identity has evolved since 1967, in relation to social, political, economic, and cultural changes. Indeed, historical developments impact the particular ways an "Indian" is represented in a particular time; what makes a "real Indian" tends to shift with the political and social needs of the moment. This paper examines the way Native identity is represented in eight productions of Rita Joe mounted between 1967 and 1992, creating a production history that focuses on the relationship between representations of identity and particular moments in time and space and, ultimately, discerns a complex and symbiotic relationship between the aesthetic, creative world and the historio-political world. Perhaps most remarkably, the play stretches to accommodate diverse cultural narratives, gathering meaning from the identity politics of its particular performance place and time. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This study is about the Burns Lake Indian Band's Indian Reserve No. 18 located in northwestern British Columbia. It is a case study that spans the 20th century. Through an analysis of archival documents pertaining to land loss I investigate the long term process that facilitated the alienation of land from this Indian reserve. This thesis is about borders, spatial marginality and social geography and it focuses on power and inequality. Historical records reveal the genesis of growing polarization and deteriorating social relationships evident in the clearly demarcated communities which establish the Indian reserve and the Village of Burns Lake. Theoretical perspectives informing my analysis include social construction, standpoint theory, and the sociology of storytelling. It includes postmodernist concepts of authority and power. The storytelling process sets the stage for contested history. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

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The concepts of marginality, social class, and goal-orientation were operationally defined. The relationships between these concepts were explored in order to discern their utility in describing the marginal conditions of Indian migrants to an urban area. Marginality was found to be reflected by the extent of identification of Indian migrants with the urban community. Marginal conditions were also more closely linked to social class than goal orientations of parents. Differences in the types of marginality experienced are related to the length of residence in the urban area.

This thesis concerns the introduction of exogenous cultural materials among the native inhabitants of the Alaskan and Northwest coasts prior to the and of the 18th century. It is an investigation of the sources of these materials and the manner and chronology of their introduction. The research is based primarily on data drawn from accounts of native life by explorers and fur traders who visited the coasts of northwestern North America in the 18th century. These accounts are supplemented by ethnologic and archaeologic data collected by anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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